Facebook plans to introduce “lite” version

A large number of Facebook users received a message yesterday, telling them they’d been invited to test something called Facebook Lite. The messages turned out to be an accident, and the users who received them couldn’t sign up. Because nobody’s seen it yet, there’s still a lot of speculation about what Facebook Lite actually is.

Facebook’s recent acquisition of FriendFeed has led some people to believe that Facebook Lite is a bare-bones, status-updates-only version of Facebook, designed to compete with Twitter. Although this would make some sense, TechCrunch says it’s the wrong answer. Based on information that Facebook Lite is already being tested in India, they’re reporting that Facebook Lite is just a slimmer, low-bandwidth version of the site, targeted for users whose Internet connections are too slow to properly use the current version.